Does bought traffic = Clicks?

[DeROK]

I found a site that will send you 1000 visitors for $1.95. My site's eCPM is around $30, so if the numbers held, I could be potentially making $28. Apparently they own popular domain names and would redirect the traffic to my site.

My first question is whether or not using these means to get traffic is within TOS?

My second question is whether or not you think the traffic I would be receiving would be of quality at all. I could be getting traffic, but if they don't click all it will do is send my stats crashing and hurt me in the long run.

What do you guys think?

[greedy player]

You run the risk that 1000 proxies will bot your adsense account and you will get banned.

Personaly stick to buying traffic at AdWords, everything else sucks. at least with adwords your visitors are looking for your site if their searching gogole and this make you money because your the place to be :)

[crick]

This is against Google TOS.

[DeROK]

Ok thanks. I had a feeling it was probably too good to be true. But I figured that this was the place to ask.

[greatstart]

I never buy traffic. I get it all for free!

[anton23]

You can buy traffic from AdWords and also from Yahoo. 1.95$ for 1000 clicks is cheap, against the TOS and probably useless.

[greedy player]

Probably spam traffic, traffic from Domain re-seller pages.

[humblebeginnings]

Personaly stick to buying traffic at AdWords, everything else sucks.

Traffic from Yahoo Search Marketing is also very high quality traffic!

[maxgoldie]

I wonder which option of buying traffic would send visitors most likely to click - MSN, Google or Y?

I think that the ones using MSN search (as pre-set in MSIE) might be the ones most likely to click on ads.

[jomaxx]

I happened to get a ton of traffic from MSN a few days ago, due to a sample search that they feature each day on their homepage. The AdSense CTR was huge.

I don't have a baseline for that specific landing page, but the CTR from that traffic was about 2X the average for the site as a whole.

[maxgoldie]

FWIW, most of the adsense click-thrus on my site come from MSN search. Most of the least tech-savvy people I know (most likely to click ads, and least likely to block them), just use MSIE with its default MSN search.

[deviantlnx]

Why is buying traffic against TOS?

[fischermx]

I think buying traffic is not directly against the TOS. However, it might get your "invalid clicks" and get you booted from the program.

[SanDiego Art]

There is no difference in buying your traffic from Google, Yahoo, or John Doe as far as being against the TOS. There aren't restrictions in marketing your website and driving traffic.

As far as an increase in "invalid" clicks would get you thrown out... I don't see this as something to be concerned with either unless the traffic being provided is doing something malicious.

It is possible (more likely than not) that the visitors aren't as targeted as the source leads you to believe and could lower your earnings (EPC) by affecting your SmartPricing by not converting for the advertiser.

[jomaxx]

Yes there IS a difference and if you use one of these bulk traffic sources then IMO you are at serious risk of being banned. These sites are pure junk, sending you the worst untargeted and involuntary traffic.

Domain redirects, popups/popunders, blind links, paid-to-surf scams, spyware... This isn't traffic you buy, it's traffic you ban.

[Jafo]

I have tried these $1.95/1000 hit sites before (what can you really lose?) and found that they all come from popunders. They put YOUR page in a popunder. Very untargetd too.

When I first did it, my CTR fell dramatically, so I wrote up an .htaccess file that put these popunder vistors to an exact replica of my home page, but without adsense ads. If they clicked to a another page, then they started viewing ads. This seems to work well for me.

Actually, you don't even need an .htaccess file, just create a copy of the page you want them to land on, without the ads, and use that as the landing page for the ad campaign. You should make sure that page doesn't get indexed in a search engine though, because it could hurt your main pages SE rank.

[jomaxx]

BTW showing AdSense ads in any popunder is explicitly prohibited.

At least one person has also reported being banned for "sneaky redirects" related to the practice of buying bulk traffic, but whether that specifically refers to domain redirects or spyware or what, I don't know.